CD-Laboratory for Genomics and Bioinformatics

The principal goal of our research plan is to link genes to function on a genomic scale in order to facilitate investigations of physiological and pathophysiological mechanisms underlying metabolic diseases. Together, researchers at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Graz University of Technology, the company Oridis Biomed, Graz and the company Eccocell, Graz have developed a broad-based response to this challenge in which we will develop a number of reagents, tools, and techniques that will allow us to provide links between physiologically relevant animal models of human disease and the genes that are differentially expressed in those phenotypes. The starting point for our proposed studies are mouse phenotypes that are relevant to liver diseases and obesity, and corresponding human disease tissues. Expression profiling will be performed using murine cDNA microarrays constructed in our laboratory and human disease-specific cDNA microarrays generated by Oridis Biomed as well as genome-sized human microarrays that will be produced. Expression data will be analyzed using: a) large-scale functional prediction on gene sets selected by expression criteria from cDNA microarray data, and b) large-scale comparative analyses of the human and mouse transcripts. Finally, to characterize the biochemical and cellular function of the target proteins, protein expression patterns in normal and diseased tissues will be examined using tissue microarrays.